Page 152 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

THE CURSE OF THE SMILE

This book is written in the spirit of that ideal, but it also articulates a profound
ambivalence towards it – an ambivalence which, I hope to show in this chapter, is
both necessary and inevitable.
To be sure, many critics have emphasized the fact that Australia remains a deeply
racist society despite its apparent commitment to multiculturalism (and, for that
matter, to reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians).
Indeed, it seems fair to say that an acceptance of the values of pluralism and
tolerance does not guarantee a disappearance of racism (Hage 1994; Stratton
1998). It is in recognition of this perceived incomplete abolition of the racist taint
that the Labor government has initiated the adoption of racial vilification laws,
for example. One problem with such avowedly ‘anti-racist’ measures (and the
discourses that go along with them) is that they tend to be formulated from
the implicit assumption that it is possible to make racism disappear. In this way,
racism is tacitly conceived as deviant from the non-racist norm, an extremist
aberration, something that, like a cancer, can be removed from the social body.
What is constructed as a consequence is the image of a society which, in the end,
will be free of racial prejudice and discrimination. But I want to argue that the
idealized fantasy of such a purified, squeaky clean utopia only blinds us to the always
less-than-perfect messiness of daily life in social space, where ‘cultural diversity’
can have many different, complex and contradictory meanings and effects.
The myth of pluralist tolerance (or tolerant pluralism) itself plays an important
role in upholding such a fantasy. While Australians are now interpellated as being
tolerant and as seeing tolerance as a virtue, the discourse of multiculturalism has
by and large relegated intolerance to the realm of the forbidden, the ‘politically
incorrect’. Stronger still, precisely because intolerance (except in exceptional
cases) has been legislated against as violating the preferred, multicultural order, the
expression of actual and real tensions resulting from living in a culturally diverse
society – and the feelings of resentment and animosity they can induce – cannot
be done without risking being branded as evidence of ‘racism’, and explained away
in the process. In other words, as the case of Pauline Hanson has abundantly
proven, the imaginary construction of ‘multicultural Australia’ depends on a
demonization of the racist other. It is based on the assumption that when all
intolerance has finally been purged, the non-racist, tolerant utopia will be realized.
The problem with this representation lies in the simple binary oppositioning and
separating out of (good) tolerance and (bad) intolerance, and in the illusion that
we can have one without the other. It should be noted, however, that tolerance
itself is irrevocably dependent on intolerance, insofar as it can only establish itself

through a fundamental intolerance towards intolerance. As Slavoj Zizek has
remarked:
The traditional liberal opposition between ‘open’ pluralist societies and
‘closed’ nationalist-corporatist societies founded on the exclusion of the
Other has thus to be brought to its point of self-reference: the liberal gaze
itself functions according to the same logic, insofar as it is founded upon

141